Actor, Playwright, and Producer PEGGY SHAW has received three OBIE Awards for her work with the Lesbian Theater Company, Split Britches, which she founded with Lois Weaver and Deb Margolin in 1980. She won the Obie Awards for her performances in “Dress Suits to Hire,” a collaboration with Holly Hughes, “Belle Reprieve,” a collaboration with the London-based theater troupe BlooLips, and “Menopausal Gentleman,” directed by Rebecca Taichman.
In the mid 1980’s she co-founded the obie-award winning WOW Café in New York City. Since 1997, Shaw has branched out into solo performances beginning with “You’re Just Like My Father”, a funny yet melancholy self-portrait of a young woman developing a butch identity in Eisenhower’s America. Among her celebrated works are “you’re Just Like My Father,” “Lust and Comfort,” Upwardly Mobile Home,” “Lesbians Who Kill,” and the Jane Chambers Award-winning play “Split Britches.”
Peggy is a 1988 and 1995, and 1999 New York Foundation for the Arts award winner for Emerging Forms. She received the 1995 Anderson Foundation Stonewall Award for excellence in “making the world a better place for gays and lesbians,” and Split Britches is a two-time nominee for the Cal Arts Herb Albert Award.
Peggy just received the 2000-2001 Rockefeller MAP Grant to create her new show “To My Chagrin.” In addition to her work with Split Britches, she played Billy Tipton in American Place’s production of Carson Kreitzer’s “The Slow Drag”, she was a collaborator, writer, and performer with Spiderwoman Theater and Hot Peaches Theater and co-founder in 1980 of the OBIE award winning WOW Café in New York City. Split Britches teaches Performance in residence at various colleges including Hampshire College, University of Hawaii, University of Northern Iowa, U.S. Davis, Cal Arts, U.C. Riverside, Harvard, M.I.T., and William and Mary. Peggy has taught Solo Performance at Vassar, Smith, Wells, U. Mass, Amherst, Mt. Holyoke, and Hampshire College.
Routledge Press has released a book simultaneously in London and New York on the Company entitled “Split Britches: Lesbian Practice, Feminist Performance,” edited by Sue Ellen Case, which includes seven Split Britches’ plays.
VIVIAN STOLL has performed and recorded as a drummer and vibraphonist with a diverse range of artists including Isis, Unknown Gender, Frank Maya, Kay Gardner, Rosalie Sorrels and Presents of Mind. She studied at the Music Technology department of NYU and has worked as an audio engineer for NPR and several small record labels. Currently, she teaches sound design for film students at the School of Visual Arts in New York City; she also engineers and produces independent music projects, including several recent recordings with producer Roma Baran. Her music and sound design credits include: Split Britches Company's Salad of the Bad Cafe; Peggy Shaw's OBIE award winning "Menopausal Gentleman"; Holly Hughes' "Preaching to the Perverted"; Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy; and dance pieces by choreographers Jon Kinzel and Maureen Ellenhorn.
